For those who regularly fire rifles or pistols, the cost of ammunition is an expensive consideration. Practice sessions for law enforcement personnel, military units, or avid sportsmen commonly involve firing hundreds of rounds. As any gun enthusiast well knows, ammunition is not cheap and can be expended fairly rapidly, especially if using a semi-or fully-automatic weapon. The exorbitant cost of new ammunition combined with its inherent wastefulness inevitably points to a need for systems which reuse the spent shells.
As seen in FIG. 1, a small-arms (pistols and rifles) round generally comprises three sections: a bullet 20, a shell 22 and a primer 24. The bullet 20 is the eventual projectile and as such has a blunt conical, aerodynamically streamlined shape. Commonly, bullets are expendable and have an outer metal jacket with an inner core of a lead alloy for greater mass. The shell 22 is a hollow cylinder with an open end sized to hold tight the trailing end of the bullet 20 when press-fit around it. Gun powder 26, or other similar propellant, fills the interior of the shell 22. A small flash hole 28 in the center of the closed end of the shell leads to a primer socket 30. The primer 24 comprises a small metal cup 32 partially filled with a combustible composition 34. A anvil 36 partially covers the combustible composition 34 within the primer 24. The primer 24 is forced into the socket 30 in the shell 22 so that the combustible composition 34 is proximate the flash hole 28, and the bottom of the metal cup 32 is flush with the closed end of the shell. The closed end of the shell includes a rigid base 35 with a flange 37 for gripping during reloading.
When a pistol or rifle is fired, a hammer strikes the exposed end of the primer in the shell, forcing the anvil to compress and ignite the combustible composition. The primer composition undergoes a fast, controlled burn which in turn ignites the main propellant via the flash hole. The shell is commonly made of brass and is manufactured softer in the middle portion which allows that portion to expand under the combustion forces of the burning propellant and grip the inside of the gun barrel. All of the remaining energy from the propellant combustion is transferred to the trailing end of the bullet, sending it out the open end of the gun barrel. The spent primer remains wedged in the end of the shell which is commonly ejected from the gun automatically, or upon recocking. The shell can then be retrieved and a new primer, propellant and bullet added to produce a recycled ready-for-use round.
Machines for reloading shells have been known for many years. Most of the machines are classed into one of two groups depending on the number of shells handled. Single-stage machines can perform all the necessary reloading functions, one at a time. In other words, one function is performed for a number of shells before a second function is performed on the same shells. Alternatively, one shell is reloaded completely in a single-stage machine before a second is inserted. Conversely, progressive machines perform multiple operations on different shells at once. This type of machine works like an assembly line with a moving carriage shifting the shells from one step to the next until finally reloaded. Both types of reloading machines require a large amount of manual assistance, creating numerous opportunities for tragic mishaps, due to the danger of extensive handling of explosives.
The primers, in particular, are handled extensively in prior art machines and contain an extremely volatile chemical. Traditionally, a box of primers, packed by the manufacturer, is dumped into a pan which is shaken to cause the primer cups to orient themselves with their open ends up. The primers are then inserted by hand into long tubes which serve as feed mechanisms for the reloading machines One by one, the primers are extracted from the lower end of the tubes and transferred to a position under a de-primed shell. This movement intensive path from shipping container to shell creates many opportunities for the primers to be inadvertently detonated. The feed tube becomes a virtual bomb if one primer is stacked wrong and detonates, causing sympathetic detonation of multiple primers Accidental explosions occur regularly considering the number of gun owners in this country and there is a dire need for a system designed to eliminate the hazards surrounding primer handling and reloading.
There are other deficiencies inherent in the prior art primer handling systems. One or more primers may be misaligned within the feed tube causing the primers to be subsequently forced into the ammunition shell at an angle. Upon firing of the gun, the primer may actually explode in an uncontrolled combustion, resulting in possible injury to the operator. The feed tubes are opaque and mask the number of primers within.
It is common for avid sportsmen to experiment with primers of different kinds to achieve a particular performance. Primers are manufactured by numerous companies in three sizes (0.175", 0.210" and 0.211"), with two different types and/or amounts of combustible material for pistols and rifles, and with either a standard or magnum classification. The feed tubes are cumbersome when a variation of primer is desired. Either the feed tube has to be emptied and refilled, or multiple feed tubes are required, adding to the cost.
Typical prior art containers used to ship primers comprise a plastic rack with 100 (10 rows, 10 columns) apertures designed to loosely hold primers. The primers are kept apart from one another to comply with federal transportation safety codes. However, the geometry of these prior shipping containers dictates that the primers in the middle rows disadvantageously have eight adjacent primers in close proximity. If, by some accidental or negligent circumstance, one of the middle primers detonated, the chances are good for a sympathetic detonation of one of the adjacent primers.
Another potentially serious, but certainly more exasperating, drawback of shipping containers of the prior art is seen in their lack of retaining means to prevent primers from spilling once the outer cardboard cover is removed. The primers rest in the apertures loosely, and the plastic rack is easily overturned, causing the primers to fall out. In fact, the rack is specifically designed to allow the primers to be emptied easily into an orienting tray for subsequent loading into a reloader feed tube or other feed mechanism. Primers may detonate on hitting an object or the ground or if stepped on, causing injury. Also, due to the multitude of types of primers, and their similar appearance, loose primers are essentially lost. A typical sportsman may have primers of several types laying about the reloading shop area, and distinguishing one from the other is a time-consuming and arduous task. Even after identifying a particular primer, it most likely has acquired dust and/or oil from the environment, possibly resulting in a diminished, or otherwise unpredictable, detonating performance.
Primer feed mechanisms which accept a plurality of loose primers and dispense them one by one are prevalent. Included in this category are U.S. Pat. Nos. to Lee (374,482), Place (605,339), Peterson (2,031,850), Smith et al. (3,408,892), Dillon (4,163,410 and 4,343,222), Mantel (4,429,610) and Lee (4,542,677). The feeders may be stacks, rotary channels, arcuate channels or funnel-like structures. In all these devices, the primers move relative to the feeders. Additionally, all of the primer feeders of the prior art require the primers to be removed from the shipping container and manually aligned before insertion into the feeder. Disadvantageously, primer reloaders of the prior art require a substantial number of structural parts involved in mounting the feed container and transferring the primer from the feed container to the shell. In addition, prior art reloaders have two push pin assemblies for the two sizes of primers (0.175 and 0.210 inch), which have to be interchanged when switching to a new primer size.